Inner child work, fun and joy for wellbeing

Fiona: 00:02

We often think of wellbeing as one-dimensional. What if we look at it from a different perspective?

Josephine: 00:08

The possibilities are endless. All we have to do is step outside the square.

Let's walk this walk together and hold on tight for the ride.

Fiona: 00:16

My name is Fiona. I'm a corporate wellness facilitator, body image and eating psychology coach and a lover of joyful experiences.

Josephine: 00:24

And I'm Josephine, a dietitian, somatic release therapist and a recovering people pleaser and perfectionist.

Fiona and Josephine: 00:30

Welcome to Outside the Square.

Fiona: 00:35

Welcome back. It's another week.

Josephine: 00:39

We're pleased to be back and today we are talking about a really important topic, which is connecting to our inner child.

Fiona: 00:49

I just spent the weekend away last weekend with some friends with two small children and oh it just filled my cup. They are just the most interesting little people. I loved watching them and I love seeing just how much joy they have, how much creativity they have, watching their feelings, watching them have those big feelings and you know working through and learning how to deal with something that as adults we might think is so silly or so small but it's such a big thing for them when they can't go for a walk or they're not allowed to do something on their own, or it's bedtime or whatever it might be.

Josephine: 01:34

Yeah, that full permission to allow ourselves to play, to feel, to have the meltdown. We just don't allow ourselves that as adults do we?

Fiona: 01:44

No, I think we learn from a very young age to either to push those feelings down and work through them really quickly. Or to ignore them or to just get on with it, stop crying, stop that now, it's been enough. Let's move on. And I think we do that in as adults as well for ourselves. Oh, no, I don't want to feel that now. Oh, no, I don't have time for that.

Josephine: 02:07

Yeah, or we compartmentalise it to parts of our lives. Like, I don't know, some of my friends or even my husband, who are so good at play and fun, I also feel that sometimes it's just not there like that part of them just gets shut down, when they’re natural at being the joker and the fun and the life of the party. But we tell ourselves, oh in this work situation, it's not appropriate to be that fun.

What if it was?

Fiona: 02:35

Yeah, it's interesting, I sort of go the other way where I'm quite serious to start with so I'm probably one of those people who would see someone playing in a situation where I thought they needed to be professional and would be going “stop now, this is not the time or the place to have fun”.

Josephine: 02:50

Ha ha ha.

Fiona: 02:51

But for me, it's because I need to feel safe to have fun. So to be able to feel like I can have a laugh or I can really let go, I need to feel like the people around me or the space around me is a safe space to do that, and I think that certainly for me comes from my inner child and from my childhood.

Josephine: 03:13

Yeah, yeah.

Fiona: 03:16

So once I feel safe I'll be as silly as the rest of them, but that won't come initially or immediately.

Josephine: 03:22

Yeah I have to admit I'm the same. I yeah, I was quite a serious child. I still can be quite a serious person and that's why I think it's so important that we do reconnect to that inner child before we started shutting down some of this joy or fun or creativity or even our desires in life.

Like I used to have massive dreams and then I became scared to have those dreams or inadvertently I got a message from someone that actually my dreams were too much, I was too much my fun was too much, you know, I was being too silly.

Fiona: 03:54

Why do you think it's important that we continue to connect with that, like what's the link with that joy, that being able to let loose and have the big feelings whether that's the fun or being silly or having the tantrum and experiencing the emotions, all those things that we see children do, how does that link with wellbeing as an adult? How does having fun and being like a child help me with my wellbeing? What is that link for you?

Josephine: 04:24

So many people that walk into my clinic room, when they think about wanting to bring more joy and happiness into their lives, they cry.

Fiona: 04:33

Mmmmmm

Josephine: 04:34

And I've been there too, I was just talking about my desires as a 20 year old the other day and I cried because I realised that I'd shut them down, that life had become really serious. Either my ego got in the way and I wanted to live up to everyone else's expectations, that I forgot to have fun, I forgot that life could be easeful and joyful and connecting back with my inner child has allowed their ease and joy to come back in.

And that's because those experiences at age two or six or ten or twenty, they don't go away. We're still living out the emotional patterns from that time as adults. We're all walking around with these younger versions of ourselves dictating how we show up in the world until we reconnect with them, understand them, and start to nurture that part of ourselves. and in that way we can start to release some of those emotional patterns, emotional blocks, fears and start to choose a different way of living.

Maybe it is bringing back their ease, maybe it is allowing yourself to be creative or play, maybe it's that as an adult you choose to feel worthy or enough when as a child you didn't. It's work that we all need to do.

Fiona: 05:59

That is so powerful. That connection that we can have as you say to the children that are in us, that we carry with us for our whole lives.

Josephine: 06:11

Mmmm, yeah. And the amount of adults I hear that say that they're exhausted by life, that they don't know why all these things are being thrown at them, that they just want to break, and it’s like ‘hang on a minute, we didn't feel like that as children. We had limitless energy.’ And yeah, it is exhausting if you don't allow yourself to connect with that sacral chakra, the joy, the desires, the play, the creativity, the things that light you up and give us energy. We think we don't have time to do those things or rediscover what those things are. Four years ago, I don't know what I love to do, I don't know what I love to do to play, but if we can start to rediscover what does light us up and give us energy, then our energy and our life force comes back.

Fiona: 07:00

I agree. Exploring some of those things, when you see adults and quite often, when I go and visit friends who have kids, we end up playing with the toys more than the children do. Now I know how to use the blocks I can, I can make all sorts of things or, come and do some colouring in or some painting just for the sake of it.

I think there's a point at which we learn or, you know, as we move through our development, we learn to do something with that, that there has to be an output at the other side, as opposed to just doing it for the joy of the experience and it doesn't matter what the painting looks like at the other end. And I feel like that probably taps into both of us as perfectionists.

A couple of years ago, I got back into sewing and crafting, but I always like sort of felt like it wasn't good enough ‘I have to make a top or I have to make something and of if it’s not perfect, then I can't wear it”. And it was like ‘just do it for the fun of it, make a bag, make a bookmark’, so I started making bunting and I made a cape for my niece and nephews, like little superhero capes and they don't care if there's a stitch out of place. They just see it as, oh my gosh, I've got something to play with.

So I sort of had to let go of ‘what's the output going to be, what's the end part of this going to be’ and just enjoy the process and the creativity for what it was, and for the joy it brought me in the moment, rather than ‘what am I doing this for? What's the outcome going to be?’ It's not about the outcome, it’s about the activity, it’s about the journey.

Josephine: 08:47

I know so many people listening are going to resonate with that. I attract working with people in high expectations and perfectionism, no surprises there, and I do myself., like sometimes you deny yourself even starting a project. Like, I wouldn't even try to sew because I don't know if I can do it, there's an element of ‘I might fail’ and then I miss the whole, I miss the whole experience of maybe making a wicked bookmark, or being shocked and surprised because yeah, I actually didn't know what I was creating, but I created something I love.

Fiona: 09:22

Yeah. I had actually just a couple of weeks ago, my dad came over and he brought as parents sometimes tend to do once we become adults, they go through the things that we've left at their house and go, ‘ah, this is all your stuff from childhood, here you go have it back now’. And he had brought some music books.

So I learned a couple of different instruments as a child. I started on the violin and then I learnt the piano and then I learnt the flute and in high school I was in the band and I still have my flute here in my house and I haven't played it in years, and one of the things that my dad brought back to me was a chart that I had written on the front, know, Fiona's flute fingering chart, which tells you where to put your fingers to make all the notes on the flute, along with a couple of the books that had the music that I used to play in it. And I thought to myself, ‘oh, I should pull my flute out I used to love playing music’, and I pulled my flute out and I’d completely forgotten. I was like, ‘can I even make a noise?’ And then I was like, ‘hold on, I can't read the music anymore’ and I had to use my fingering chart from when I was, you know, twelve and it felt so clunky., but it was funny reconnecting to that and realising that I'd sort of forgotten how much joy I got from playing music and sometimes those reminders come to you and you can you can get back to those spaces and enjoy them for what they are.

And it's okay that you don't know how to do it. It's okay. You know, I think sometimes we struggle to learn as adults, we don't want to go back to that space, as you say ‘I wouldn't start making something because I don't know what the end outcome is going to be’. Well if, it's like what we say with children, if you don't try, you're never going to know. So, give it a try.

Josephine: 11:17

Yeah, yeah, my mum's staying at the moment and she's just delivered me some plates that I painted, you know, there were the era of going and painting a plate for parties, and I've started using them in my everyday life. They're ridiculous, you know, turtles, octopus, fish and plants, but one of them, I found absolutely fascinating. It was a triangular plate with a plant on it, which looks like wooly mullein, which is the plant that in my current life right now I'm obsessed with, I eat it, I make tea from it, I watch it through the seasons, I feel its energy and it gives me energy and I drew that at age ten, or painted that by just turning my brain off and painting something. I found that fascinating that I've stopped painting but it's something I'd love to do in my current day life and something I've asked for paints for my 35th birthday.

Fiona: 12:16

Yay

Josephine: 12:20

To reconnect with that part of myself.

Fiona: 12:24

It’s a perfect example of, you and I work a lot in the space of listening the lessons, diving deeper into what's coming up for us physically, emotionally, what we see in our spaces, you know, what comes along and knowing that there's often a divine timing to that or learning to trust that there is a divine timing in that, and I think connecting back to those things as children is really important because it's that repetition, if we weren't able to learn that lesson or get through that, that hard thing or to notice what was going on as a child, that lesson's going to keep coming up, and that's where those patterns come from. We've talked so much already in this podcast about noticing our patterns and so often they form in childhood.

So, coming back to that plant and sort of seeing it again from that childhood perspective, that that's actually where you're still looking at now think is that repetition and that this is something to pay attention to and it's going to keep coming up until, as you are as an adult now, really diving into that and paying attention to what that lesson is.

Josephine: 13:44

Yeah, so right, and these lessons, if you've got an emotional pattern that needs to be healed, it will keep hitting you in the face, you know life is not kind, ha ha. If you've got some shit to work through, it's going to keep coming up, you can't avoid it.

I’ve just had two years of failing in my business quote unquote, or unravelling the business that I spent five years creating, and that was the biggest gift, you know like I kept thinking, ‘maybe I can make this work. Maybe if I just did something different, I could make this work’, but no, there'd be another financial crisis I’d have to make someone redundant, and then there'd be another referrer that I decided I wasn't aligned with and had to let go of. And through those two years, I had to nurture that fear of failure right the way, like from different ages all the way through my life, you know, right the way back because it was such a prominent theme for me. And not just for me, but through my lineage, you know, I could see the fear of failure through my dad's line very clearly, people pleasers didn’t like conflict. I could see other forms of failure through my maternal line of just not tolerating failure, not being enough if there was failure and then lots of conflict coming in.

And that played out in my business in those two years, and I'm so grateful for it because it took me two years of losing that identity of being able to be a successful female business owner, and be liked in their role - big one - to heal feeling like a failure. I felt like a failure my whole life and when I actually had the experience of failing again and again, know, the universe just kept allowing me that to fail again, I literally had to hold that inner child, I had to hold the five year old who didn't feel safe when she failed, that felt like no one loved her and I had to give myself unconditional love no matter how many people I heard in the process, and I never ever would have got through that and broken that for my family line, you know, that's going to change my son's experience of this world with the help of two years of failure, it’s such a gift.

Fiona: 16:00

So powerful, isn't it? That repetition and the power that we have as adults to connect with, to re-parent in a way, our own inner children.

It was a little while ago that I was doing some inner child work and someone said, ‘what would your inner child, what, let your inner child make the rules’. Because so often as kids we don't feel like we have a lot of empowerment, we don't feel like we have a lot of control over things that are happening in our life, and so I pulled out all of my paints and my coloured paper and I let my inner child decorate all of these little pages of this little rule book and for those of you listening, I'll put a photo up on the Instagram grid so you can see my creative process, and funnily enough, the design is very similar to the design on my flute fingering chart. So my creativity has always been the same in terms of how I decorate pieces of paper, but it was interesting coming back to looking at what some of my inner child rules were when I just said, ‘you know, you can be in charge’, and one of them, I thought was really powerful and it's actually words that my mother used to say to me and used to write to me whenever I was struggling, which was remember your breathing exercises.

Because I have experienced generalised anxiety and social anxiety since I was a child, I didn't get diagnosed till I was an adult, formally, but my mother knew, and I was part of a study actually for the University of Queensland when I was a child, looking at interventions for over-anxious children. So I used to go, we had to write, fill out all of our little forms about how we felt about things and it's the same sort of diagnostic forms that they use now for looking at anxiety. And we learnt these breathing exercises and it's something that I always used to forget to do was my breathing exercises.

So that was a really important rule that I wrote in my little rule book of inner child is to remember those breathing exercises, and it's interesting because even just in the last couple of weeks when we've been doing some of these breathing exercises for all of you through this podcast, I've been using those more frequently than I usually do. I had a headache a couple of days ago and I thought, remember Josephine's exercise for just breathing through the discomfort and I sat there and really felt that, breathed into it and it released. So some of those things that we know that we can do as children can still be so powerful, I think, when we get to adulthood.

So, I love the idea of your inner child being in charge for a little while. I had some other great rules that Telly is allowed anytime, so screen time very important to me as a child. I think I said you could have ice cream for breakfast, sweets anytime, sweets for breakfast is allowed.

And one of them was also try new things sometimes, you never know you might like it, and it's funny because I hear so many kids talking about that in relation to food. As adults, we teach kids, particularly picky kids, just have a try. You never know you might like it, give it a try. How often do we do that as adults? Give something a try going, you never know, you might like it. So I think that's a really important rule, but that was one that my inner child decided to put forth for me to live by.

Josephine: 19:46

I love each of those rules, there's so much learning from your inner child, right? Like, just give something a try, you might like it. Well you're going to have to hold your five-year-old or seven-year-old selves hand through that. You know, because that would have been hard, we do try and get our children to just give it a try, but it's not easy to go through that discomfort for a child and equally, it's not easy for us as an adult.

TV anytime, like, how cool is that? Like, how many of us binge watch a Netflix series and feel guilty about it? When maybe we just need to allow ourselves to sit down and watch it more regularly, you know, don't have something more serious to do like the cleaning up. There's some wisdom therefrom your younger child.

Fiona: 20:26

Yeah, that's true for everybody. There is so much wisdom in your own inner child and allowing your inner child to have a voice and make those rules and for you to be able to then, as you say, hold your hand, hold your own hand by living by those rules that your inner child has created for you.

Josephine: 20:49

And it's like, it's the permission for them to be able to make the rule right, or for our inner child to actually do something that we've always wanted to do. Because I know that if I gave myself permission to eat ice cream for breakfast or told myself to eat ice cream for breakfast for seven days, I wouldn't want to do it, but my inner child wants to know that I could do that and that totally breaks the binge eating cycle of craving sugar across your day if you know you can have it when you want it.

Fiona: 21:16

Yeah, it's that connection with food I think is so important from that space of, you know, binge eating or emotional eating or just chronic dieting. As adults we put so much rule around, you know, what we're eating, ‘I must eat this many calories every day, that's what my diet is going to be’ and I'm regardless of whether I'm hungry or not, and what you'll find as an adult is that some days that many calories is enough, and or too much. sometimes you don't want to eat that much and you force yourself to eat because I'm on the diet and the diet says that I have to have this many calories every day.

And other days, you're starving, and that many calories is nowhere near enough and you feel so terrible and you're irritated because you're hungry, but you can't eat anything else because I'm on the diet and the diet says that I have to have this many calories a day. And that's not how children eat.

Josephine: 22:11

No.

Fiona: 22:12

I was talking to my friend, she was talking about her toddler who just said, some days he just eats nothing and other days he eats the entire fridge, and I think kids are so intuitive in that space, they know when they're hungry, they know when they're not, they know what they need and what we bring into adulthood is rules and restrictions around that. So can we allow ourselves to have the ice cream with our breakfast, or to just eat when we want to eat when we're hungry or to not if we're not hungry, it's okay. Get back into tune with that because we do do it naturally.

We often deny ourself what that is and as adults, we look at what's happening with our children and we sort of go ‘okay, so over the week he’s eating pretty well’, and yet as individual adults, we tend to judge each particular meal. We don't look at it as ‘over the week, I've done pretty well’. So can we connect that back?

Josephine: 23:15

Yeah, because connecting with our inner child is connecting back with our body intuition. So exactly right, that's what we're doing. And breaking these emotional patterns with food, with allowing ourselves creativity, with allowing ourselves to fail. It's terrifying, like it's really scary. You have these patterns to protect you. It's a protective mechanism that we've learnt across our lifetimes so it's so valuable to see yourself at those different ages, maybe it's looking at a photograph or maybe it's remembering an experience you had and how you felt and what you needed at that time so that you can start to nurture your own self as an adult in a whole different way. Like actually give yourself unconditional love when you feel like a failure. Yeah, hold yourself really tenderly, let yourself feel incredibly upset so that it becomes less scary once you can do that. So that is, that's big work.

Fiona: 24:11

Big work. We've talked today about a couple of different things, you know, around that creativity piece, maybe giving something a try, making your own little rule book, let your inner child dictate the rules for a while.

What are some of the other ways that you think are really simple and doable for people to be able to connect with their inner child?

Josephine: 24:34

I love desire work. So, it's not even work, it's noticing when you have a desire. When something feels like fun or joy we're often really quick to shut it down, so if you can start to bring your awareness to when you think, ‘I'd be fun to wear that colour today, it’d be fun to put that on’ and and then you think ‘no it's not the right context’ I challenge you to just do it anyway.

I mean, at first just notice and you'll start to notice it more and more. That ‘oh it would be really nice to sit in the sun and have my lunch’ and then the email pings and you go and do that instead. And it's starting to follow those breadcrumbs of your desires what your body intuition is telling you you need, before you shut it down because it's silly or indulgent and just allowing yourself to have those things again.

Fiona: 25:28

I love that, finding something that you haven't done in a while and that you want to do because that's going to look different for every person who's listening, but I think that every person who's listening has had that voice ‘oh, wouldn't it be fun’ or ‘I wish I could still get away with doing whatever or get away with wearing whatever’.

I struggle to not dance when there's music that comes on in the shops and the number of times that I have not had a little boogie because, well, I'm a grown up in the supermarket and yet if I have a child with me, I'll dance. So how can I do that with just me?

Josephine: 26:09

The permission to play. Music is so powerful.

Fiona: 26:16

So some really great little tips to try this week. And I would love to hear what some of those things are for you, so please get in touch with us. Let us know what is something you're going to try this week, maybe it's something new that you never got to do as a child and you want to give it a go because you never know, you might like it.

What are the rules that you're in a child would write if they were in charge? What is the experience that you have when you give yourself permission to be silly? What is the silly thing you're doing? What is the colour that you're going to wear? What is that going to look like? Let's inspire each other to do something this week for our inner child and share it together.

Josephine: 27:08

Thank you for that beautiful summary Fiona let's leave it there. Have a great week everyone.

Josephine: 27:14

Before we finish up for today, we would like to acknowledge the original custodians of the lands on which our podcast is created, the Ngāi Tahu people of Aotearoa New Zealand,

Fiona: 27:23

and the Cammeraygal people of the Eora Nation Australia. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and to all our listeners who identify as Aboriginal, Torres Straight Islander, or Maori.

Josephine: 27:36

We love connecting with you, our listeners and talking about the topics that mean the most to you. Reach out to us on Instagram at Outside the Square Podcast and let us know what you want to hear more of.

Fiona: 27:46

Until next week, keep stepping outside your square.